Certain committees offer fewer restrictions for lawmaker spending

The maximum individual contribution to a legislative candidate is $4,100.

The state’s ethics watchdog agency has moved to clamp down on politicians’ use of the committees. In January 2009, the Fair Political Practices Commission voted to require that funds raised for ballot-measure campaigns be spent on particular propositions. Commissioners stopped short of prohibiting spending on measures before they qualified for the ballot.

The changes were spurred by high-profile examples of questionable spending.

Former Senate President Pro Tempore Don Perata, D-Oakland, five years ago transferred $1.9 million from his ballot measure committee to another committee he established to hire lawyers to fight a protracted federal corruption probe.

Last year, the FPPC fined former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger $30,000 after a ballot measure committee he formed spent more than $1 million on issues unrelated to initiatives. Schwarzenegger’s “California Dream Team” used ballot funds to pay for television advertising amid heated state budget negotiations, commissioners concluded.

The FPPC’s tightened regulations require that ballot measure committees be identified as such and list the names of the politicians controlling them. They don’t restrict politicians from spending large sums of money on general political activities that could be argued have little to do with a specific ballot measure.

“There are legitimate concerns from the FPPC on this, but obviously the legislature doesn’t want restrictions on how they can spend money so they will kill almost any bill that attempts to cut or control these issues,” Ung said of further attempts to rein in the spending.

Many Democratic lawmakers with ballot-measure funds contributed last year to Gov. Jerry Brown’s successful Proposition 30 tax hike and against the unsuccessful Proposition 32, which sought to curtail the political clout of unions. The $35,400 from de León’s ballot fund that went to identifiable ballot measures went to promote Proposition 30 and defeat Proposition 32.

Assembly Speaker John Pérez, D-Los Angeles, gave more than half of the $377,846 he spent from his “Building California’s Future” directly toward those causes.

“There are issues that impact the state and that affect policy that are on the ballot and that are bigger than the speaker as an individual assembly member so he wants to get involved and that’s in particular why he made significant contributions to pass Prop. 30 and defeat Prop. 32,” said Doug Herman, Pérez’s political strategist.

Given the large sums of money politicians spent on consulting and campaign services — without identifying a specific measure — Herman said the standard should be whether the committee produces any meaningful activity, such as giving to an identifiable campaign.

Kim Alexander, founder of the California Voter Foundation, said it’s worth questioning the copious amounts of fundraising, particularly in cases where ballot measure committees only end up spending a fraction of their money on initiatives.

“If the committee is taking in $200,000 and only $20,000 of it can be traced to supporting a particular initiative, what was the purpose of raising the other $180,000?” said Alexander, whose organization works to enhance the public’s access to information about proposition donors.